My personal opinion is that the current spate of tory reforms to the benefit system are cruel, regressive, and worst of all won't save money (the alleged intention).

In a supposedly modern civilised country one would think housing would be considered a human right.......rather than simply an investment / a chance to make a fast buck.

I note there is talk of a yacht for the biggest benefit claimee of them all. I note over £10billion has been spent on the olympics. I note £32billion is being spent on a high speed rail link (london-birmingham) - this will shave, a no doubt absolutely vita,l 32mins off the journey (essential??!!!) and be used by a miniscule % of the UK population.

How about investing this money in affordable social housing instead? Or do government no longer care to invest in those they view as peasants and serfs?

The tories efforts to turn the nation against those unfortunate enough to find themselves unemployed via vile smears, and an insidious propaganda campaign, are reminiscent of Nazi germany's propaganda campaign against the jews.

Iain Duncan Smith is a disgusting human being and has blood on his hands.

Instead of kicking the weakest targets that can't defend themselves....maybe the Bullingdon bullies should try picking on somebody their own size.....like the bankers, or benefit leeching corporations like Tescos.

They currently resemble a 20st thug stamping on a little girls head.

Welfare is essential and if we are to remain a civilised country we owe it to ourselves to provide for those less fortunate; unless we want to see people starving and homeless turning into savages.

The biggest burden on the UK in recent times has not been the unemployed.....welfare is not a burden - it is an essential expense in a civilised nation.

The biggest burden, and the cause of much unemployment, has been the rich greedy bankers who have cost this country, and us taxpayers, untold £billions in order to benefit a few. They have placed the real burden on the UK.

Today's Sunday Times is apparently sceptical about there being "more work" around. Revised figures from the ONS are expected to show that the number of people in zero hours contracts has almost doubled from the previously calculated half a million. Elsewhere in the financial section of the paper, Kathryn Cooper remarks that although Britain now has 4.9 million "small businesses" that number incorporates 3.7 million which employ no staff.

Last week Iain Duncan Smith met a whistleblower who worked for his Department for Work and Pensions for more than 20 years. Giving the Secretary of State a dossier of evidence, the former Jobcentre Plus adviser told him of a “brutal and bullying” culture of “setting claimants up to fail”. He claimed that managers would change people’s appointments without telling them: "The appointment wouldn’t arrive in time in the post so they would miss it and have to be sanctioned. That’s fraud. The customer fails to attend. Their claim is closed. It’s called ‘off-flow’ – they come off the statistics. Unemployment has dropped.”

Debbie Abrahams, Labour MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth and the member of the DWP Select Committee who set up the meeting, has renewed her call for an inquiry into inappropriate sanctioning. Sanctions can last from a couple of days to three years, and leave claimants destitute.

Abrahams also says that Esther McVey agreed to a sanctions inquiry, but then made a U-turn, adding: “Just what are Iain Duncan Smith and Esther McVey trying to hide? This government has developed a culture in which Jobcentre Plus advisers are expected to sanction claimants using unjust, and potentially fraudulent actions, in order get people off the dole. This creates the illusion the government is bringing down unemployment. The last thing they want is for this uncomfortable truth to be uncovered.”

The Independent on Saturday 5 July commented upon a report from research firm Key Retirement Solutions, finding that Pensioners now have to spend £10,387 a year on basic necessities such as food and fuel. Groceries cost a minimum of £1,563 per person per year according to the survey, with another similar sum going on Housing and fuel bills.

"Until recently, the idea of people dying of poverty in the UK seemed unfathomable to me. I really thought the days of British people relying on charity in order to eat were left firmly in Victorian times. However, our reliance on emergency packages from food banks is at a record high. It's growing hard to ignore that the coalition's austerity measures are killing people in droves. Take the Atos Work Capability Assessments for example; an estimated 10,000 people receiving a form of disability benefit have died within six weeks of being declared 'fit for work' by Atos.

When people steal from the state through benefit fraud, there's public outcry. But when the state steals from the people by failing to provide even a basic standard of living, whilst corruption and tax evasion run unchecked, we're told it's all part of a necessary strategy for economic recovery. It's outlandishly offensive for millionaire Iain Duncan Smith to advise those struggling to land a job to 'get on a bus' away from their homes until they've found a job elsewhere. You certainly don't need me to tell you that it's criminal that Vodafone have been let off paying an estimated £6 billion in tax.

If huge wealthy corporations aren't paying their tax, whilst schools and hospitals and ordinary people collapse, the onus should be on those corporations who owe the state money to make their fair contribution. It just goes to show that austerity is so much more about ideology - the dehumanisation of the poor and the literal destruction of state infrastructure - than it ever was about economy."

As Iain Duncan Smith was being lauded at the Conservative Party Conference for ending ‘a culture of dependency’ through welfare reform, one wondered how many people present knew or cared about one significant but unmentioned fact.

Just a few months ago, Professor Gabor Gombos stated that the United Kingdom has the distinction of being the first country to be investigated by the United Nations Committee for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, regarding ‘grave and systemic violations’ of the human rights of its sick and disabled citizens.

You can watch a video of Professor Gombos talking about this here, starting one hour and four minutes into the video. He explains, "The enquiry procedure is basically about grave and systemic violations of human rights in a country. Where the issue has been raised and the government did not really make effective actions to fix the situation (it is a very high threshold thing – the violations should really be grave and systemic, it cannot be based on gossip) it should be established."

Perhaps many people at the party conferences, particularly those celebrating the ‘achievements’ of welfare reform, were unaware of this, as it was mainly reported in specialist media such as the Disability News Service and has been dismissed out of hand by government ministers. But many at the sharp end of welfare reform, and who are aware, welcome the inquiry. They now see a system which often seems to have been designed to cause maximum distress and hardship, effectively punishing people for being unwell.

People like welfare rights adviser Nick Dilworth who was recently the subject of a feature in the Guardian) see the terrible human cost of the chaos and delays now endemic in the system of support for sick and disabled people, a system that has been ‘reformed’ to disastrous effect, and which people are expected to navigate, often at the lowest point in their lives.

“I don’t think the public knows how bad it is. In the past we’ve nearly always been able to find a solution [to people’s problems]. Now you come across situations where there is no answer and you can’t do anything.

“You get grown men crying. What you see are broken lives. It means we are seeing people for whom all you can do is give short-term answers like food-bank vouchers.’

Nick has also gained a reputation for his rigorous analysis of statistics issued by the Department for Work and Pensions. Through his blog he challenges the rhetoric that has surrounded welfare reform, and its underlying assumptions. He completely rejects, for instance, Iain Duncan Smith’s claim that people were ‘parked on sickness benefits’, pointing out that whilst the numbers may have remained fairly constant, these were not the same people, there was a continuous ‘churn rate’ as people moved on and off benefits as their circumstances changed.

Nick is part of New Approach, a group which is calling for the abolition of the notorious Work Capability Assessment and a far more supportive approach to helping sick and disabled people find employment if they are well enough.

New Approach warmly welcomes the UN investigation into the United Kingdom’s treatment of people with disabilities. Jane Bence, who herself has uncontrolled epilepsy, says, "The UN Investigation offers us all hope, hope which wasn't there before and hope which none of the main political parties are offering us. A 'new approach' and thought is needed towards Social Security and this investigation could bring that closer."

So, whilst Ministers and their supporters congratulate themselves on fixing ‘broken Britain’, (a concept they themselves invented), the United Nations seems to be heeding the distress of sick and disabled people whose lives are being made unbearable. The government may claim that welfare reform is a success, but history, and the United Nations, may tell a different story.

There must be some surprise at how willing the Tory Party seems to be to shoot itself in the foot. Having alienated almost all sections of society (apart from the filthy rich), how can they still harbour any expectations of achieving a majority of seats from a General Election?

It's just getting harder and harder for them to hide their true nature, isn't it?

The comments of Freud about disabled people were not only abominable but didn't even show any evidence of having applied thought to any of the issues around disability - the debate about paying disabled people a lower rate was in the '70's and we decided then that this would be exploitative and open to gross abuse - you'd think he'd at least look at SOME research, history or other evidence before making a public statement

Reminder: Lord Freud (recommended by the Tories for a peerage in 2009, five months after he joined their party) was caught out at the Tory conference suggesting some disabled workers are “not worth” the national minimum wage and should be paid just £2 an hour.

Lord Freud was a Tory time-bomb just waiting to explode

From an article by Chris Blackhurst:-

If you read about Freud's time spent working in the City, then his latest comments come as little surprise.

Asked whether his wealth meant that he could not understand life on benefits, he replied: "You don’t have to be the corpse to be at the funeral". Another was when he suggested more people were using food banks because there were more food banks. The other was his suggestion that the children of families affected by the 'bedroom tax' could use a sofa bed when visiting a separated parent.

None of which would raise a single eyebrow in the City. Most City folk would regard what he said as eminently sensible – except they would choose to end benefits, scrap food banks and would struggle to get their heads round anyone not having a spare room.

I wish he would swap places with me for a month or two, deciding what to have for dinner two nights on the trot, home made chilli that lasts four meals so it's with rice the first night and jacket spud the second, then a tin of soup the next night, asda's own pizza the next, then burgers and sausages with egg and chips the next, cheese salad rolls the next with crisps, then maybe a pork chop with roast spuds and veg, there you go my menu for the week.

I do vary my diet boatlady, but that was this weeks menu as I only have one meal a day at night after my night time medication.But I see it as fun trying to vary it then sometimes I just get plain bored.

The widely-publicised "full employment" we are currently enjoying does not seem to have increased the receipts at Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs of PAYE tax, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics.

"Many of the newly created jobs are of very poor quality. The ranks of workers in 'time-related underemployment' - doing fewer hours than they wish due to a lack of availability of work - have swollen dramatically. Between 1999 and 2006, only about 1.9% of workers were in such a position; by 2012-13 the figure was 8%.

Then there is the extraordinary increase in self-employment. Its share of total employment, whose historical norm (1984-2007) was 12.6%, now stands at an unprecedented 15%. With no evidence of a sudden burst of entrepreneurial energy among Britons, we may conclude that many are in self-employment out of necessity or even desperation."

Indeed. The Tories have always been sensitive about the measure of employment. In the 1980s, unemployment figures were deliberately massaged down by re-categorising large numbers as disabled. Made possible by the riches then gushing from North Sea Oil. Now the machinery has had to be thrown into reverse.

Blood-curdling threats of draconian action against law-breakers, from the (unelected) government, were routine in Spain under the Fascist Dictator Franco. Fascinating to watch how eager some of our elected politicians are to adopt similar language here.